Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
CNN reports: An Illinois sheriff filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the owners of craigslist, accusing the popular national classified-ad Web site of knowingly promoting prostitution. The sheriff is upset that the site maintains a bulletin board system which is very lightly policed by its creators. It is little more than a forum for people [...]
During my summer internship at CEI, a couple of us interns discussed the book Cato’s Robert Levy published last May, The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. We looked at Levy’s list of the worst decisions and sent each other lists of our own. Now that I’m taking ConLaw, I [...]
At Stanford Law School, I am a member of the Stanford Law and Technology Association and the Center for Internet and Society. I write for CIS’s publication, Packets. I just published a piece summarizing the recent Third Circuit case once again holding the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional. When the decision was released back in [...]
WASHINGTON – November 4 /TLF News Service/ — The recently announced Alcohol Liberation Front event, Thursday, November 6 from 5:30pm on at Gazuza (1629 Connecticut Ave NW), has already roiled the social media world, but organizers pledge to carry on despite the ALF 7 controversies. “I ain’t a quitter. People ask me to quit. ‘Stop [...]
Facing threats of legal action from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, many ISPs have curbed newsgroup access in the name of fighting child porn. Now, it looks like a big fish is holding out: Comcast. Good for them. While it’s understandable that other ISPs elected to fold under intense pressure from an overzealous AG [...]
I have long been intrigued with the effort to regulate online gaming activities because it represents the most sophisticated effort by our government yet to eradicate a specific class of online speech or commerce. (My TLF colleague Tom Bell has done seminal work in this field). In her weekly “The Regulators” column, The Washington Post’s [...]
Some months ago, I noted that Betzip.com (since rechristened “PurePlay.com”) employs an intriguing legal hack to avoid anti-gambling regulations. It charges its customers a flat monthly fee, which qualifies them to win large prizes for winning online poker games. Non-paying customers can play the same games for free, too—though without qualifying for the largest prizes. [...]
We’ve done a lot of writing about Internet gambling issues here at the TLF over the years. (Complete archives here). One of the things that always intrigues me about these debates is how passionate some policymakers can get about the supposed “evils” of private online gambling even though many of them support state-run lotteries. What [...]
Common sense agrees with this libertarian understanding–the world is one of consequences, community institutions are vital to human life, and human beings have an innate nature that we should harness, not deny.
Betcha.com recently began offering a U.S.-based, P2P, honor-based betting service. Its FAQ claims that Betcha.com avoids the reach of domestic state and federal anti-gambling laws because, “Unlike any other betting venue on the planet, Betcha bettors always retain the right to withdraw their bets . . . . Therefore, they are not ‘risking’ anything. No [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
